Harpreet Bedi, CEO of The Garcha Group, reflects on how a lifetime of travel has shaped her faith, her work, and her family
I had a childhood spent growing up in different countries, as my father was an ambassador for India. My earliest memories were of living in a plethora of places—Spain, Seychelles, Mozambique. We were so used to traveling between countries that, before the Berlin Wall came down, we would stay in East Berlin and go to West Berlin when we wanted good ice cream.
When I was 18, I was often my father’s official hostess for all of the state dinners, as my mom went traveling in the Middle East by herself for a year. When it was my time to be away from my family—as when I went to Sweet Briar College in Virginia, in the United States—I found that I was able to contribute in other, unexpected ways: the president then of Poland, Lech Walesa, asked my father to give his team a lesson on economics. The Solidarity Party was coming in, and the country was moving from a communist/socialist government to a democracy. We arranged for my professors to give Walesa's cabinet an Economics 101 lesson, bringing their American perspective to the newly democratised Eastern Bloc country.
What does it mean to be a Sikh?
If traveling around the world is one thing that has shaped me and my values, my faith as a Sikh is another. I’ve found that our faith is often misunderstood—my father wears a turban, which make us look like we’re really orthodox (and can lead to mistaken assumptions about our identity). In reality, Sikhism is one of the most liberal religions out there, and its words and values are very modern. The equality of women is very important—in fact, many Sikh women have, historically, been warriors. As a result, I feel very strongly about women being treated equally shows itself in the way we do business and in the way we try to accommodate the needs of working women with their families. We try to hire more women to give them financial independence.
My desire to shed light on Sikhism is one reason I collaborated with my husband, Satinder Garcha, along with director Mike Rogers and producer Meghan Shea, on the movie Under the Turban, which came out in 2016 after eight years in the making, and won an award from the United Nations Film Festival. In making the movie, these two major strands of my life—my faith and traveling—came together as we visited many Sikh temples around the world with a film crew.
